Pennsylvania's Primary: Paperless and Unverifiable
Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 12:30PM
TheSpook

From AlterNet [HERE]
By Verified Voting Foundation

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The Presidential primary on April 22 will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable -- an irony, because state law requires manual audits of a statistical sample of ballots cast in elections.

Over 85% of Pennsylvania's voters live in counties in which paperless electronic voting is the only method of voting at the polling place. Absentee voting requires an excuse in Pennsylvania, and there is no early voting period, so the polling-place equipment will tabulate the vast majority of the votes in the primary. Pennsylvania's Secretary of State has judged that reel-to-reel paper trail printers compromise voter privacy, and none of Pennsylvania's direct-recording electronic (DRE) systems offer voter-verifiable paper records.

Here is a summary of the voting systems used in Pennsylvania:

As a complete reading of the California and Ohio reviews will reveal, all of the optical systems used in Pennsylvania have serious security vulnerabilities. But optical scan systems offer a record of the votes that is independent of the software in the machine. And Pennsylvania law, 25 P.S. 3031.17, offers the best defense against these vulnerabilities: a random manual audit of ballots cast in an election. Only the counties with paper ballots can implement this law in a meaningful way.

Although November is looming nearer, Lackawanna County decided in March 2008 to switch to an optical scan/ballot-marker solution in time for the April 22 primary.

Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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